If anything is unequivocally good for cities, it’s bikes. The more bike-friendly a city is, all else being equal, the more pleasant it is; cities where lots of people ride bikes are places where everyone wants to be. The philosopher Ivan Illich articulated this well: The bicycle "allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being." In 2005, when I was in college, I remember someone exclaiming that we could have used the money spent on the war in Iraq to buy every kid in America a skateboard. That was a joke, but if you swap out skateboards for bikes (or even if you don't) it's frankly better than most ideas. People have been riding bikes for more than a century and bikes, not cars, were the original impetus for paving American streets—yet, judging by the tone of recent hype about
#45: Universal Basic Skateboard
#45: Universal Basic Skateboard
#45: Universal Basic Skateboard
If anything is unequivocally good for cities, it’s bikes. The more bike-friendly a city is, all else being equal, the more pleasant it is; cities where lots of people ride bikes are places where everyone wants to be. The philosopher Ivan Illich articulated this well: The bicycle "allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being." In 2005, when I was in college, I remember someone exclaiming that we could have used the money spent on the war in Iraq to buy every kid in America a skateboard. That was a joke, but if you swap out skateboards for bikes (or even if you don't) it's frankly better than most ideas. People have been riding bikes for more than a century and bikes, not cars, were the original impetus for paving American streets—yet, judging by the tone of recent hype about